Monday, July 13, 2009

Come upstairs/I'll force-feed you/book covers

Book Covers
Can I ever get enough gorgeous, startling book cover design? No. Delicious book covers with credits and notes are at this blog, Covers. It is updated by a design firm called Fwis, who design, you guessed it, book covers. Yum! And here's another book cover blog, because you've been good, Book Covers Anonymous. Some of the posts highlight different covers used for US/UK editions. I could look at these all day.

Want to design your own now? You can buy these naked Penguins and go wild. I bought The Waves and I intend to harass an artist friend until he designs the cover.

And from the Covers blog, this shelf, this shelf,
I WANT IT. I want many many like it, all custom-carved to fit my books. Giant puzzles on my walls. Imagine?

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Force-feeding

I have been trying to use the word gavage in my story. It means force-feed. It can be used regarding the feeding of infants who cannot suck, or people who need super-alimentation. It can also refer to force-feeding as torture, and the way geese are fed to create foie gras.

I can't use it in my story. It's the right image, but the wrong word. I've checked all my dictionaries (I have a collection) and thesauruses, and most do not have the word. My French and my medical dictionaries have it though, as it is a French word and medical term.

Sometimes english feels so limiting.

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Come Upstairs

Now I am trying to decide if my character would say:

Come upstairs, I have to show you the shoes I bought.
or
Come upstairs, you need to see the shoes I bought.

She's a small-n narcissist, a sophisticated drama queen, generous and selfish at once. I can't decide if she'd stick with the pronoun "I" - "I" have to show you, or whether she'd prefer to tell her friend what to do - "you need to see". The "come upstairs" is already imperative. Maybe I should follow Gordon Lish's idea of letting the beginning of a sentence dictate where it should end.

Come upstairs and see the shoes I bought.
Come upstairs. Come see the shoes I bought.

I'll work on it.

1 comment:

Mich said...

What about "Come upstairs. I bought shoes." with the 'you need to see them' implied?